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American Catholic Hospitals
A Century of Changing Markets and Missions
Wall, Barbra Mann
Rutgers University Press, 2016

“Wall traces the nursing and management roles of nuns and brothers in church-related US health care institutions. This well-documented volume will be a useful addition for collections supporting academic programs in public health, hospital administration, bioethics, and divinity, and for comprehensive collections in the history of medicine. Recommended.” —Choice
 
American Catholic Hospitals is fair, balanced, insightful, and intriguing. The story Wall tells—a story about a significant segment of the US health care system—is meticulously documented. Readers will find her study to be illuminating, even inspirational.” —Journal of the American Medical Association
 
“In American Catholic Hospitals, Barbra Mann Hall traces the ways Catholic hospitals have accommodated changes both within the church and in society over the last century. Her book is well researched and a fascinating read.” —Health Progress
 
“Wall presents a compelling and well-documented narrative of the dynamic transformation of Catholic hospitals in twentieth-century America. Drawing on records from Catholic congregations throughout the United States, she reveals an admirable perseverance of religious caregivers, demonstrated by their willingness to adapt to socioeconomic forces often inimical to charitable care.” —American Catholic Studies
 
American Catholic Hospitals is meticulously researched and well written. Although it is certainly appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate students, general readers also will find it to be an excellent overview of the history of the changes that Catholic health-care institutions have undergone in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” —Catholic Historical Review

American Catholic Hospitals offers a tremendous amount of new material and refreshing perspectives on current health care system challenges in the United States.” —Sioban Nelson, Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto
 
“Wall provides solid scholarship and engaging insight into the historic and contemporary contributions of American Catholic hospitals and their ability to adapt and serve amid the changing landscapes of church and state, culture wars, and healthcare reforms of the 20th century.” —Carol K. Coburn, author of Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836-1920
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Associate Degree Nursing Education
An Historical Annotated Bibliography, 1942–1988
Patricia T. Haase
Duke University Press, 1990
This volume offers a comprehensive listing, from the development of the Associate Degree Nursing (ADN) program in 1948 to the present, of all literature related to the ADN program. Any item related to the degree programs and their contributions, the AD nurses, their relation to nurses trained in other programs, and their role in the health care system is included. Published and unpublished items as well as dissertations, research reports and monographs, state and federal government documents, materials issued by state and national nursing groups, journal articles, and books are listed.
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Being Ill
On Sickness, Care and Abandonment
Neil Vickers and Derek Bolton
Reaktion Books, 2024
Original, moving, and drawing from a range of fields, an essential exploration of what it means to be ill.
 
A serious illness often changes the way others see us. Few, if any, relationships remain the same. The sick become more dependent on partners and family members, while more distant contacts become strained. The carers of the ill are also often isolated. This book focuses on our sense of self when ill and how infirmity plays out in our relationships with others. Neil Vickers and Derek Bolton offer an original perspective, drawing on neuroscience, psychology, and psychoanalysis as well as memoirs of the ill or their carers to reveal how a sense of connectedness and group belonging can not only improve care but also make societies more resilient to illness. This is an essential book on the experience of major illness.
[more]

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Between the Heartbeats
Poetry and Prose by Nurses
Cortney Davis
University of Iowa Press, 1995
"This volume of poetry and prose is written by nurses about their experiences of caring. It describes their disasters, their triumphs, their joy and sorrow. It is, quite simply, wonderful. . . . Beg, steal, or borrow this book; if that fails, buy it."--Nursing Times "Their [the nurses'] words expand the practice of nursing as well as the practice of language. By bearing witness to the intimate details of nursing, from the mundane to the beautiful to the tragic, they reveal the epiphanies of life and death."--ADVANCE for Nurse Practitioners "A striking, often beautiful collection which brings to speech what occurs between the caring and the cared for--moments at the edges of life when, for most of us, even crucial communication seems beyond the reach of words. Coming now, Between the Heartbeats seems a particularly important book, breaking as it does the silence of women and men who, perhaps more than any others, live the essentials behind the health care debate."--Honor Moore, author of The White Blackbird "Powerful, honest and vivid, this collection of stories and poetry gives voice to the compassion and grief felt by nurses from around the world. A compelling and graceful anthology which will touch any reader, regardless of medical background."--Creative Health Care Resources "A new class of authors who are experienced professionals as well as skilled and talented writers, these nurses write out of a powerful sense of the immediacy of the body, the concreteness of suffering, and the nuanced individuality of their patients. Honest, vivid, and unsentimental, the works of this collection will not fail to move--at times even astonish--medical and nonmedical readers alike."--Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, College of Medicine, Pennsylvania State University "The best nurses have always been holistically oriented: they are the inevitable sharers of our mind, body, and soul secrets. Reading Between the Heartbeats, we share theirs. These fine poems, stories, and memoirs are honed, harrowing, and surprisingly life-affirming vignettes of the here and now. Between the Heartbeats is a splendid merger of the healing and written arts."--Dick Allen, Director of Creative Writing, University of Bridgeport Nurses who are also creative writers have a powerful empathetic outlet for the joys and griefs of their everyday experiences. In Between the Heartbeats an international, diverse community of nurses write honestly and compassionately about their work. By unsentimentally translating out suffering into prose and poetry, the registered nurses in this brave, graceful anthology perform another enduring act of loving care. THIS HAPPENED Cortney Davis My point is that illness is not a metaphor ... --Susan Sontag The intern and I begin our rounds. In room two, the intern watches me; he doesn't like this patient anyway-- she's messy, a see-through plastic tube pulls bile from her stomach to a bottle near her head. A small balloon inside her throat keeps pressure on vessels wrecked by years of gin. The patient's wide awake, but she can't talk. I see her eyes open, her skin pale at the moment these veins blow, like a tire blows. Blood backs up her nose. She tries to sit; her wrists are tied. I take her hand and say, OK. OK. The intern leaves. Next the patient's gut lets go. Stool and blood clot between her legs, hot and soft, not like sex, more like giving birth. OK, I say. We let our fingers intertwine. By 8:15 the woman calms. Clots thicken in her throat; she holds her breath. At nine, blood coins close her eyes. I breathe deep, stroke the patient's arm. The intern, who went downstairs to sleep, will ask me later. But what happened here can't be said again and be the same. WHAT ABEL SAYS Patricia Maher Abel talks in stories. He tells me a string of them about the sea and a small boat anchored yet moving with the wind and water. Abel tells me he too is anchored anchored to his house by the dirt, he says. I listen, realizing my silence is the precious thing I bring. It makes space for hope. My breathing is shallow the stench is so deep at Abel's. My foot stamps to keep the gray mice away his pets, he says since he lost his dog. He eats cold beans out of the can happy for my company. Frayed shirt and long beard his shoes are molded to his feet. I took them off for him once but now we just stand facing his mantle and look at the pictures and bills. His wife's pocketbook although she's long gone sits open as if she might return like an anchor he can't bear to pull up nor can I, yet. INSTRUCTING A NEW MOTHER Dawn Ramm Like a Little Barracuda the newborn latches on-- nurses until a nipple bleeds. Move him to the other breast, I advise-- speak for the hospital and for the numerous books I have read: how to hold him how to open his mouth how to break the suction with a finger. Yet I never knew my body as this mother does-- its natural capacity. I measured exact amounts of evaporated milk, Karo syrup and water. The efficient nurse who contaminated nothing.
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Beyond Method
Philosophical Conversations in Healthcare Research and Scholarship
Edited by Pamela M. Ironside
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005
Beyond Method provides a forum for scholars across health and human sciences disciplines to explore issues surrounding philosophy, methodology, and epistemology in the context of interpretive scholarship. The essays comprising this volume move beyond the practical descriptions or the "how to" of interpretive methods commonly found in textbooks to explore the contributions, underlying assumptions, limitations, and possibilities embedded within and across particular philosophical, methodological, and epistemological perspectives. They reveal the complexity and richness of understanding that emerges when philosophical issues are explicated within contemporary contexts, illuminating new possibilities for healthcare and human science scholarship.
[more]

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Biomedicen and Beatitude
An Introduction to Catholic Bioethics, Second Edition
Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
This timely and up to date new edition of Biomedicine and Beatitude features an entirely new chapter on the ethics of bodily modification. It is also updated throughout to reflect the pontificate of Pope Francis, recent concerns including ethical issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic, and feedback from the many instructors who used the first edition in the classroom.
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Bodies and Souls
Politics and the Professionalization of Nursing in France, 1880-1922
Katrin Schultheiss
Harvard University Press, 2001

In the French Third Republic, nursing was an occupation caught in the crosscurrents of conflicting notions about the role of women. This deft political history shows how the turmoil and transformation of nursing during this period reflected the political and cultural tensions at work in the nation, including critical conflicts over the role of the Church in society, the professionalization of medicine, the organization and growing militancy of the working classes, and the emancipation of women.

Bodies and Souls describes a time when nursing evolved from a vocation dominated by Catholic orders to a feminine profession that included increasing numbers of lay women. As she pursues this story from the founding of the first full-time professional nursing school in Lyons through the changes wrought by World War I, Katrin Schultheiss reveals how the debates over what nurses were to be, know, and do were deeply enmeshed in issues of class, definitions of femininity, the nature of women's work, and the gendered character of social and national service. Her fine study maps the intersection of these debates with political forces, their impact on hospital nursing and nursing education, and on the shaping of a feminine version of citizenship in France.

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A Bold Profession
African Nurses in Rural Apartheid South Africa
Leslie Anne Hadfield
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
In rural South African clinics, Black nurses played critical roles. Charged with administering valuable and life-saving health care measures despite a lack of equipment and personnel, these nurses had to navigate the intersections of traditional African healing practices, changing gender relations, and increasing educational and economic opportunities for South Africa’s Black middle class between the 1960s and 1980s.
 
Leslie Anne Hadfield compellingly demonstrates how these women were able to successfully carve out their own professional space and reshape notions of health and healing in the Eastern Cape. Bringing forth the stories of these nurses in their own voices, A Bold Profession is an homage to their dedication to the well-being of their communities. Hadfield sheds light on the struggles of balancing commitment to career and family lives during an oppressive apartheid. The volume fills an important gap for scholars studying the history of women, nursing, and health care in South Africa, illuminating the humanity of health care workers.
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A Caring Approach in Nursing Administration
Jan J. Nyberg
University Press of Colorado, 2010
Current mainstream books and publicity about management and administration in health care are concerned with the takeover of health care by managed-care organizations. Many provide lots of quick and externally focused answers. Many of them are economically driven, to the exclusion of humans, values, ethics, and the human spirit of all those who pass through systems as deliverers and receivers of care. On the other hand, there is a new generation of works that address new forms of administration and leadership-works that inspire and evoke foundational changes in health care and forms of organizational leadership and management. This work by Dr. Jan Nyberg is guided by a lifelong career of administration and management that is informed by deeper human dimensions of caring, and more lasting approaches to change than quick-fix, economic takeovers.

Jan Nyberg, an experienced nursing administrator, scholar, and educator, knows another way-from the inside out rather than the outside in. She brings forth her wisdom and knowledge, experiences, and insights so that others may now grasp another way to transform systems for delivery of human caring and healing. This work informs, instructs, and inspires; it invites nurse leaders and other health administrators to reach for what might be, rather than succumbing to what already is.

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Catheters, Slurs, and Pickup Lines
Professional Intimacy in Hospital Nursing
Lisa C. Ruchti
Temple University Press, 2012

Every day, hospital nurses must negotiate intimate trust and intimate conflict in an effort to provide quality health care. However, interactions between nurses and patients—which often require issues of privacy—are sometimes made more uncomfortable with inappropriate behavior, as when a patient has a racist and/or sexist outburst. Not all nurses are prepared to handle such intimacy, but they can all learn how to "be caring."

In Catheters, Slurs, and Pickup Lines, Lisa Ruchti carefully examines this fragile relationship between intimacy and professional care, and provides a language for patients, nurses, and administrators to teach, conduct, and advocate for knowledgeable and skilled intimate care in a hospital setting. She also recommends best training practices and practical and effective policy changes to handle conflicts.

Ruchti shows that "caring" is not just a personality characteristic but is work that is structured by intersections of race, gender, and nationality.

 

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Clara Barton's Civil War
Between Bullet and Hospital
Donald C. Pfanz
Westholme Publishing, 2018
Through Battle Dispatches, Letters, and Other Records, Discovering the Wartime Service of America’s Most Famous Nurse 
“I always tried to succor the wounded until medical aid and supplies could come up—I could run the risk; it made no difference to anyone if I were shot or taken prisoner.” So recorded Clara Barton, the most famous woman to emerge from the American Civil War. In an age when few women worked in hospitals, much less at the front, Barton served in at least four Union armies, providing food and assistance to wounded soldiers on battlefields stretching from Maryland to South Carolina. Thousands of soldiers benefit­ed from her actions, and she is unquestionably an American heroine. But how much do we really know about her actual wartime service? Most information about Barton’s activities comes from Barton herself. After the war, she toured the country recounting her wartime experiences to overflowing audiences. In vivid language, she described crossing the Rappahannock River under fire to succor wounded Union soldiers at Fredericksburg, transporting critical supplies to field hospitals at Antietam, and enduring searing heat and brackish water on the sun­scorched beach­es of South Carolina. She willingly braved hardship and danger in order to help the young men under her care, receiving in return their love and respect. Most of Barton’s biographers have accepted her statements at face value, but in doing so, they stand on shaky ground, for Barton was a relentless self­promoter and often embellished her stories in an effort to enhance her accomplishments. 
In Clara Barton’s Civil War: Between Bullet and Hospital, distinguished historian Donald Pfanz revisits Barton’s claims, comparing the information in her speeches with contemporary documents, including Barton’s own wartime diary and letters. In doing so, he provides the first balanced and accurate account of her wartime service—a service that in the end needed no exaggeration. 
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A Clinician's Guide to Progressive Supranuclear Palsy
Golbe, Lawrence I
Rutgers University Press, 2019
This brief, clinically-focused volume is informed by Lawrence I. Golbe’s three decades of research and tertiary clinical care in progressive supranuclear palsy, a complex disorder with rapidly changing diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. It is an ideal source for the general neurologist seeking a refresher and the primary care provider, neurological nurse, or physical, occupational or speech therapist who must address their patients’ specialized needs.
 
A Clinician’s Guide to Progressive Supranuclear Palsy emphasizes early diagnostic signs, medication options, non-pharmacologic management and palliative care. It offers a quick overview of the complications of PSP most likely to prompt an ER visit; a widening spectrum of PSP variants; and ample description of the genetics, epidemiology, natural history, pathology, molecular biology and neurochemistry of PSP. The PSP Rating Scale used in the book is a convenient tool for clinicians in routine practice and the leading PSP clinical measure world-wide. Golbe provides a practical and useful guidebook to help all clinicians learn and battle this complex disorder.
 
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Daring to Care
American Nursing and Second-Wave Feminism
Susan Gelfand Malka
University of Illinois Press, 2007
Beginning in the 1960s, second-wave feminism inspired and influenced dramatic changes in the nursing profession. Susan Gelfand Malka argues that feminism helped end nursing's subordination to medicine and provided nurses with greater autonomy and professional status. She discusses two distinct eras in nursing history. The first extended from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, when feminism seemed to belittle the occupation in its analysis of gender subordination but also fueled nursing leaders' drive for greater authority and independence. The second era began in the mid-1980s, when feminism grounded in the ethics of care appealed to a much broader group of caregivers and was incorporated into nursing education. While nurses accepted aspects of feminism, they did not necessarily identify as feminists. Nonetheless, they used, passed on, and developed feminist ideas that brought about nursing school curricula changes and the increase in self-directed and specialized roles available to caregivers in the twenty-first century.
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Dr. Nurse
Science, Politics, and the Transformation of American Nursing
Dominique A. Tobbell
University of Chicago Press, 2022
An analysis of the efforts of American nurses to establish nursing as an academic discipline and nurses as valued researchers in the decades after World War II.

Nurses represent the largest segment of the U.S. health care workforce and spend significantly more time with patients than any other member of the health care team. Dr. Nurse probes their history to examine major changes that have taken place in American health care in the second half of the twentieth century. The book reveals how federal and state health and higher education policies shaped education within health professions after World War II.

Starting in the 1950s, academic nurses sought to construct a science of nursing—distinct from that of the related biomedical or behavioral sciences—that would provide the basis for nursing practice. Their efforts transformed nursing’s labor into a valuable site of knowledge production and proved how the application of their knowledge was integral to improving patient outcomes. Exploring the knowledge claims, strategies, and politics involved as academic nurses negotiated their roles and nursing’s future, Dr. Nurse highlights how state-supported health centers have profoundly shaped nursing education and health care delivery. 
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Dr. Nurse
Science, Politics, and the Transformation of American Nursing
Dominique A. Tobbell
University of Chicago Press, 2022
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

An analysis of the efforts of American nurses to establish nursing as an academic discipline and nurses as valued researchers in the decades after World War II.


Nurses represent the largest segment of the U.S. health care workforce and spend significantly more time with patients than any other member of the health care team. Dr. Nurse probes their history to examine major changes that have taken place in American health care in the second half of the twentieth century. The book reveals how federal and state health and higher education policies shaped education within health professions after World War II.

Starting in the 1950s, academic nurses sought to construct a science of nursing—distinct from that of the related biomedical or behavioral sciences—that would provide the basis for nursing practice. Their efforts transformed nursing’s labor into a valuable site of knowledge production and proved how the application of their knowledge was integral to improving patient outcomes. Exploring the knowledge claims, strategies, and politics involved as academic nurses negotiated their roles and nursing’s future, Dr. Nurse highlights how state-supported health centers have profoundly shaped nursing education and health care delivery. 
[more]

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Dying Green
A Journey through End-of-Life Medicine in Search of Sustainable Health Care
Christine Vatovec
Rutgers University Press, 2023
The slow violence being inflicted on our environment—through everything from carbon emissions to plastic pollution—also represents an impending public health catastrophe. Yet standard health care practices are more concerned with short-term outcomes than long-term sustainability. Every resource used to deliver medical care, from IV tubes to antibiotics to electricity, has a significant environmental impact. This raises an urgent ethical dilemma: in striving to improve the health outcomes of individual patients, are we damaging human health on a global scale?
 
In Dying Green, award-winning educator Christine Vatovec offers an engaging study that asks us to consider the broader environmental sustainability of health care. Through a comparative analysis of the care provided to terminally ill patients in a conventional cancer ward, a palliative care unit, and an acute-care hospice facility, she shows how decisions made at a patient’s bedside govern the environmental footprint of the healthcare industry. Likewise, Dying Green offers insights on the many opportunities that exist for reducing the ecological impacts of medical practices in general, while also enhancing care for the dying in particular. By envisioning a more sustainable approach to care, this book offers a way forward that is better for both patients and the planet.
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Empire of Care
Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History
Catherine Ceniza Choy
Duke University Press, 2003
In western countries, including the United States, foreign-trained nurses constitute a crucial labor supply. Far and away the largest number of these nurses come from the Philippines. Why is it that a developing nation with a comparatively greater need for trained medical professionals sends so many of its nurses to work in wealthier countries? Catherine Ceniza Choy engages this question through an examination of the unique relationship between the professionalization of nursing and the twentieth-century migration of Filipinos to the United States. The first book-length study of the history of Filipino nurses in the United States, Empire of Care brings to the fore the complicated connections among nursing, American colonialism, and the racialization of Filipinos.

Choy conducted extensive interviews with Filipino nurses in New York City and spoke with leading Filipino nurses across the United States. She combines their perspectives with various others—including those of Philippine and American government and health officials—to demonstrate how the desire of Filipino nurses to migrate abroad cannot be reduced to economic logic, but must instead be understood as a fundamentally transnational process. She argues that the origins of Filipino nurse migrations do not lie in the Philippines' independence in 1946 or the relaxation of U.S. immigration rules in 1965, but rather in the creation of an Americanized hospital training system during the period of early-twentieth-century colonial rule. Choy challenges celebratory narratives regarding professional migrants’ mobility by analyzing the scapegoating of Filipino nurses during difficult political times, the absence of professional solidarity between Filipino and American nurses, and the exploitation of foreign-trained nurses through temporary work visas. She shows how the culture of American imperialism persists today, continuing to shape the reception of Filipino nurses in the United States.

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False Dawn
The Rise and Decline of Public Health Nursing
Karen Buhler-Wilkerson
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Since its initial publication in 1989 by Garland Publishing, Karen Buhler Wilkerson’s False Dawn: The Rise and Decline of Public Health Nursing remains the definitive work on the creation, work, successes, and failures of public health nursing in the United States. False Dawn explores and answers the provocative question: why did a movement that became a significant vehicle for the delivery of comprehensive health care to individuals and families fail to reach its potential? Through carefully researched chapters, Wilkerson details what she herself called the “rise and fall” narrative of public health nursing: rising to great heights in its patients' homes in the struggle to control infectious diseases, assimilate immigrants, and tame urban areas -- only to flounder during the later growth of hospitals, significant immigration restrictions, and the emergence of chronic diseases as endemic in American society. 
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Hospice
Gregory Howard
University of Alabama Press, 2015
When Lucy is little something happens to her brother. He disappears for months and when he returns he’s not the same. He’s not her brother. At least this is what Lucy believes. But what actually happened?
 
Comic, melancholy, haunted, and endlessly inventive, Gregory Howard’s debut novel Hospice follows Lucy later in life as she drifts from job to job caring for dogs, children, and older women—all the while trying to escape the questions of her past only to find herself confronting them again and again.
 
In the odd and lovely but also frightening life of Lucy, everyday neighborhoods become wonderlands where ordinary houses reveal strange inmates living together in monastic seclusion, wayward children resort to blackmail to get what they want, and hospitals seem to appear and disappear to avoid being found.
 
Replete with the sense that something strange is about to happen at any moment, Hospice blurs the borders between the mundane and miraculous, evoking the intensity of the secret world of childhood and distressing and absurd search for a place to call home.
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How We Die Now
Intimacy and the Work of Dying
Karla Erickson
Temple University Press, 2013
As we live longer and die slower and differently than our ancestors, we have come to rely more and more on end-of-life caregivers. These workers navigate a changing landscape of old age and death that many of us have little preparation to encounter. How We Die Now is an absorbing and sensitive investigation of end-of-life issues from the perspectives of patients, relatives, medical professionals, and support staff.
 
Karla Erickson immersed herself in the daily life of workers and elders in a Midwestern community for over two years to explore important questions around the theme of “how we die now.” She moves readers through and beyond the many fears that attend the social condition of old age and reveals the pleasures of living longer and the costs of slower, sometimes senseless ways of dying.
 
For all of us who are grappling with the “elder boom,” How We Die Now offers new ways of thinking about our longer lives.
[more]

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Importing Care, Faithful Service
Filipino and Indian American Nurses at a Veterans Hospital
Stephen M. Cherry
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Every year thousands of foreign-born Filipino and Indian nurses immigrate to the United States. Despite being well trained and desperately needed, they enter the country at a time, not unlike the past, when the American social and political climate is once again increasingly unwelcoming to them as immigrants. Drawing on rich ethnographic and survey data, collected over a four-year period, this study explores the role Catholicism plays in shaping the professional and community lives of foreign-born Filipino and Indian American nurses in the face of these challenges, while working at a Veterans hospital. Their stories provide unique insights into the often-unseen roles race, religion and gender play in the daily lives of new immigrants employed in American healthcare. In many ways, these nurses find themselves foreign in more ways than just their nativity. Seeing nursing as a religious calling, they care for their patients, both at the hospital and in the wider community, with a sense of divine purpose but must also confront the cultural tensions and disconnects between how they were raised and trained in another country and the legal separation of church and state. How they cope with and engage these tensions and disconnects plays an important role in not only shaping how they see themselves as Catholic nurses but their place in the new American story.
 
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Intensive Care
More Poetry and Prose by Nurses
Cortney & Judy Davis & Schaefer
University of Iowa Press, 2003

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Into Africa
A Transnational History of Catholic Medical Missions and Social Change
Wall, Barbra Mann
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Winner of the 2016 Lavinia Dock Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing

 Awarded first place in the 2016 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award in the History and Public Policy category


The most dramatic growth of Christianity in the late twentieth century has occurred in Africa, where Catholic missions have played major roles. But these missions did more than simply convert Africans. Catholic sisters became heavily involved in the Church’s health services and eventually in relief and social justice efforts. In Into Africa, Barbra Mann Wall offers a transnational history that reveals how Catholic medical and nursing sisters established relationships between local and international groups, sparking an exchange of ideas that crossed national, religious, gender, and political boundaries.
 
Both a nurse and a historian, Wall explores this intersection of religion, medicine, gender, race, and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the years following World War II, a period when European colonial rule was ending and Africans were building new governments, health care institutions, and education systems. She focuses specifically on hospitals, clinics, and schools of nursing in Ghana and Uganda run by the Medical Mission Sisters of Philadelphia; in Nigeria and Uganda by the Irish Medical Missionaries of Mary; in Tanzania by the Maryknoll Sisters of New York; and in Nigeria by a local Nigerian congregation. Wall shows how, although initially somewhat ethnocentric, the sisters gradually developed a deeper understanding of the diverse populations they served. In the process, their medical and nursing work intersected with critical social, political, and cultural debates that continue in Africa today: debates about the role of women in their local societies, the relationship of women to the nursing and medical professions and to the Catholic Church, the obligations countries have to provide care for their citizens, and the role of women in human rights.
 
A groundbreaking contribution to the study of globalization and medicine, Into Africa highlights the importance of transnational partnerships, using the stories of these nuns to enhance the understanding of medical mission work and global change.
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Listen to Me Good
The Story of an Alabama Midwife
MARGARET CHARLES SMITH
The Ohio State University Press, 1996

Margaret Charles Smith, a ninety-one-year-old Alabama midwife, has thousands of birthing stories to tell. Sifting through nearly five decades of providing care for women in rural Greene County, she relates the tales that capture the life-and-death struggle of the birthing experience and the traditions, pharmacopeia, and spiritual attitudes that influenced her practice. She debunks images of the complacent southern “granny” midwife and honors the determination, talent, and complexity of midwifery.

Fascinating to read, this book is part of the new genre of writing that recognizes the credibility of midwives who have emerged from their own communities and were educated through apprenticeship and personal experience. Past descriptions of southern black midwives have tended to denigrate their work in comparison with professional established medicine. Believed to be the oldest living (though retired) traditional African American midwife in Alabama, Smith is one of the few who can recount old-time birthing ways. Despite claims that midwives contributed to high infant mortality rates, Smith’s story emphasizes midwives' successes in facing medical challenges and emergencies.

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Listening to the Whispers
Re-thinking Ethics in Healthcare
Edited by Christine Sorrell Dinkins and Jeanne Merkle Sorrell
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

Listening to the Whispers gives voice to scholars in philosophy, medical anthropology, physical therapy, and nursing, helping readers re-think ethics across the disciplines in the context of today's healthcare system. Diverse voices, often unheard, challenge readers to enlarge the circle of their ethical concerns and look for hidden pathways toward new understandings of ethics. Essays range from a focus on the context of corporatization and managed care environments to a call for questioning the fundamental values of society as these values silently affect many others in healthcare. Each chapter is followed by a brief essay that highlights issues useful for scholarly research and classroom discussion. The conversations of interpretive research in healthcare contained in this volume encourage readers to re-think ethics in ways that will help to create an ethical healthcare system with a future of new possibilities.

Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

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Making Health Care Whole
Integrating Spirituality into Patient Care
Christina Puchalski
Templeton Press, 2021

In the last fifteen years, the field of palliative care has experienced a surge in interest in spirituality as an important aspect of caring for seriously ill and dying patients. While spirituality has been generally recognized as an essential dimension of palliative care, uniformity of spiritual care practice has been lacking across health care settings due to factors like varying understandings and definitions of spirituality, lack of resources and practical tools, and limited professional education and training in spiritual care.

In order to address these shortcomings, more than forty spiritual and palliative care experts gathered for a national conference to discuss guidelines for incorporating spirituality into palliative care. Their consensus findings form the basis of Making Health Care Whole. This important new resource provides much-needed definitions and charts a common language for addressing spiritual care across the disciplines of medicine, nursing, social work, chaplaincy, psychology, and other groups. It presents models of spiritual care that are broad and inclusive, and provides tools for screening, assessment, care planning, and interventions. This book also advocates a team approach to spiritual care, and specifies the roles of each professional on the team.
 
Serving as both a scholarly review of the field as well as a practical resource with specific recommendations to improve spiritual care in clinical practice, Making Health Care Whole will benefit hospices and palliative care programs in hospitals, home care services, and long-term care services. It will also be a valuable addition to the curriculum at seminaries, schools of theology, and medical and nursing schools.
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The Making of Man-Midwifery
Childbirth in England, 1660-1770
Adrian Wilson
Harvard University Press, 1995

In England in the seventeenth century, childbirth was the province of women. The midwife ran the birth, helped by female "gossips"; men, including the doctors of the day, were excluded both from the delivery and from the subsequent month of lying-in.

But in the eighteenth century there emerged a new practitioner: the "man-midwife" who acted in lieu of a midwife and delivered normal births. By the late eighteenth century, men-midwives had achieved a permanent place in the management of childbirth, especially in the most lucrative spheres of practice.

Why did women desert the traditional midwife? How was it that a domain of female control and collective solidarity became instead a region of male medical practice? What had broken down the barrier that had formerly excluded the male practitioner from the management of birth?

This confident and authoritative work explores and explains a remarkable transformation--a shift not just in medical practices but in gender relations. Exploring the sociocultural dimensions of childbirth, Wilson argues with great skill that it was not the desires of medical men but the choices of mothers that summoned man-midwifery into being.

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Making Room in the Clinic
Nurse Practitioners and the Evolution of Modern Health Care
Fairman, Julie
Rutgers University Press, 2009
In Making Room in the Clinic, Julie Fairman examines the context in which the nurse practitioner movement emerged, how large political and social movements influenced it, and how it contributed to the changing definition of medical care. Drawing on primary source material, including interviews with key figures in the movement, Fairman describes how this evolution helped create an influential foundation for health policies that emerged at the end of the twentieth century, including health maintenance organizations, a renewed interest in health awareness and disease prevention, and consumer-based services.
[more]

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Meaning in Suffering
Caring Practices in the Health Professions
Edited by Nancy Johnston and Alwilda Scholler-Jaquish
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
     Compelling, timely, and essential reading for healthcare providers, Meaning in Suffering addresses the multiplicity of meanings suffering brings to all it touches: patients, families, health workers, and human science professionals. Examining suffering in writing that is both methodologically rigorous and accessible, the contributors preserve first-hand experiences using narrative ethnography, existential hermeneutics, hermeneutic phenomenology, and traditional ethnography. They offer nuanced insights into suffering as a human condition experienced by persons deserving of dignity, empathy, and understanding. Collectively, these essays demonstrate that understanding the suffering of the "other" reveals something vital about the moral courage required to heal—and stay humane—in the face of suffering.
 
 
Winner, Nursing Research Category, American Journal of Nursing
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Newer Dimensions of Patient Care
Improving Staff Motivation and Competence
Esther Lucille Brown
Russell Sage Foundation, 1962
This study focuses on the staff who provide direct patient care, viewing hospital personnel in interaction with patients and in their own work groups. It examines the psychosocial needs characteristic of most workers and suggests ways to meet them to encourage increased staff motivation and competence.
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NURSING AND THE PRIVILEGE OF PRESCRIPTION
1893-2000
ARLENE W. KEELING
The Ohio State University Press, 2007

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Nursing Civil Rights
Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps
Charissa J. Threat
University of Illinois Press, 2015
In Nursing Civil Rights, Charissa J. Threat investigates the parallel battles against occupational segregation by African American women and white men in the U.S. Army.

As Threat reveals, both groups viewed their circumstances with the Army Nurse Corps as a civil rights matter. Each conducted separate integration campaigns to end the discrimination they suffered. Yet their stories defy the narrative that civil rights struggles inevitably arced toward social justice. Threat tells how progressive elements in the campaigns did indeed break down barriers in both military and civilian nursing. At the same time, she follows conservative threads to portray how some of the women who succeeded as agents of change became defenders of exclusionary practices when men sought military nursing careers. The ironic result was a struggle that simultaneously confronted and reaffirmed the social hierarchies that nurtured discrimination.

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Nursing Procedures
Marion Vannier
University of Minnesota Press, 1929

"This book is a manual of nursing procedures originally prepared for the students of the University of Minnesota School of Nursing, written to obviate the necessity of note-taking by the students during the presentation of demonstration by the instructor . . . On the whole the manual is excellent. An instructor would find it of great value in planning her demonstration. It would be difficult to improve upon the simplicity and clarity with which the steps of the procedures are given." —Pacific Coast Journal of Nursing

Nursing Procedures
was first published in 1929. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

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Nursing the Nation
Building the Nurse Labor Force
Jean C. Whelan
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Modern health care cannot exist without professional nurses. Throughout the twentieth century, there was seldom a sustained period when the supply of nurses was equal to demand. Nursing the Nation offers a historical analysis of the relationship between the development of nurse employment arrangements with patients and institutions and the appearance of nurse shortages from 1890 to 1950. The response to nursing supply and demand problems by health care institutions and policy-making organizations failed to address nurse workforce issues adequately, and this failure resulted in, at times, profound and lengthy nurse shortages. Nurses also lost the ability to control their own destiny within health care institutions while nevertheless establishing themselves as the most critical part of health care provision today.
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Nursing
The Philosophy and Science of Caring
Jean Watson
University Press of Colorado, 1991
In the evolution of the nursing profession, the phrases nursing care, therapeutic care, caring for others, and related expressions are used by nurses to describe their professional service to others. Members of our society have different thoughts and role expectations about these phrases in relation to the kind of care they receive from nurses. Furthermore, these expressions hold different meanings for nurses in their various care-giving roles, such as to individual clients, families, and community groups they serve. Care-giving and care-receiving roles of nurses have different sets of expectations and behaviors. It is well, there, that members of the nursing profession begin systematically to clarify the diverse functions and cultural values related to the concepts of care, caring, and nursing care.

The concept of care is probably one of the least understood ideas used by professional and nonprofessional people, yet it is probably one of the most important concepts to be understood by human groups. It is a word with multiple social usages in the American culture, and has other meanings in other world cultures. The terms care, caring, and nursing care have both symbolic and functional meanings as they are used by caregivers and care-recipients. Nursing care also has a general, special meaning to nurses, and is often taken for granted in nurses' thoughts and action patterns. It is time that we study the implicit and explicit meanings associated with the concepts of care and caring so that we can reduce their ambiguities. Furthermore, the humanistic, scientific, and linguistic meanings related to nursing care and caring behaviors in any culture remain a most fascinating area of study for nurses.

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Nursing
The Philosophy and Science of Caring, Revised Edition
Jean Watson
University Press of Colorado, 2008
Jean Watson's first edition of Nursing, now considered a classic, introduced the science of human caring and quickly became one of the most widely used and respected sources of conceptual models for nursing. This completely new edition offers a contemporary update and the most current perspectives on the evolution of the original philosophy and science of caring from the field's founding scholar.
A core concept for nurses and the professional and non-professional people they interact with, "care" is one of the field's least understood terms, enshrouded in conflicting expectations and meanings. Although its usages vary among cultures, caring is universal and timeless at the human level, transcending societies, religions, belief systems, and geographic boundaries, moving from Self to Other to community and beyond, affecting all of life.
This new edition reflects on the universal effects of caring and connects caring with love as the primordial moral basis both for the philosophy and science of caring practices and for healing itself. It introduces Caritas Processes, offers centering and mediation exercises on an included audio CD, and provides other energetic and reflective models to assist students and practitioners in cultivating a new level of Caritas Nursing in their work and world.
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Nursing with a Message
Public Health Demonstration Projects in New York City
D'Antonio, Patricia
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Mandated by the Affordable Care Act, public health demonstration projects have been touted as an innovative solution to the nation’s health care crisis. Yet, such projects actually have a long but little-known history, dating back to the 1920s. This groundbreaking new book reveals the key role that these local health programs—and the nurses who ran them—influenced how Americans perceived both their personal health choices and the well-being of their communities. 
 
Nursing with a Message transports readers to New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, charting the rise and fall of two community health centers, in the neighborhoods of East Harlem and Bellevue-Yorkville. Award-winning historian Patricia D’Antonio examines the day-to-day operations of these clinics, as well as the community outreach work done by nurses who visited schools, churches, and homes encouraging neighborhood residents to adopt healthier lifestyles, engage with preventive physical exams, and see to the health of their preschool children. As she reveals, these programs relied upon an often-contentious and fragile alliance between various healthcare providers, educators, social workers, and funding agencies, both public and private. Assessing both the successes and failures of these public health demonstration projects, D’Antonio also traces their legacy in shaping both the best and worst elements of today’s primary care system. 

This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition.
Download the open access ebook here.
 
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Obstetrics and Gynecology in Low-Resource Settings
A Practical Guide
Nawal M. Nour
Harvard University Press, 2016

Responding to the growing need for tried-and-trusted solutions to the reproductive health care issues confronting millions of women worldwide, Obstetrics and Gynecology in Low-Resource Settings provides practical guidelines for ensuring the delivery of quality OB/GYN care to women in resource-poor countries. Including contributions from leading clinicians and researchers in the field, this welcome overview fills an important gap in existing medical literature on women’s health care and will be an invaluable resource for doctors, clinicians, and medical students at all stages of their careers who work in the global health arena.

The reproductive health risks that all women face are greatly exacerbated when health care facilities are inadequate, equipment and medications are in short supply, and well-trained medical staff are few and far away. Often in these settings, the sole doctor or medical professional on hand has expertise in some areas of women’s reproductive care but needs a refresher course in others.

This informative guide features hands-on, step-by-step instruction for the most pertinent OB/GYN conditions—both acute and chronic—that health care workers in the field confront. The authors examine a wide range of topics, including: strategies to reduce maternal mortality and stillbirths; infectious and sexually transmitted diseases, including malaria and HIV; cervical cancer; contraception; prenatal, delivery, and newborn care; and complications arising from gender-based violence and female genital cutting. Published in a convenient format with a durable binding, this reference will be an essential companion to health care providers throughout the world.

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On Duty
Power, Politics, and the History of Nursing in New Jersey
Ward, Frances
Rutgers University Press, 2009
In 1886, Newark City Hospital opened a training school for nurses in New Jersey. With the dawn of a new century women began to demand rights that had been denied them, and nurses too demanded changes in health care and higher education. For the first time, On Duty offers a highly readable account of the struggle for professional autonomy by New Jersey nurses and reveals how their political and legislative battles mirrored the struggle of women throughout the country to redefine their roles in society.
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The Origins and Rise of Associate Degree Nursing Education
Patricia T. Haase
Duke University Press, 1990
The Origins and Rise of Associate Degree Nursing Education offers an analytical history of the beginnings and development of associate degree nursing (ADN) programs and the role of the caregivers it produces in the health care system. Nurses may be trained in two-, three-, or four-year programs, but all are eligible to take the accreditation examination to be licensed as registered nurses (RNs). The question of distinguishing between “professional” nurses from bachelor programs and “technical” nurses from the associate degree programs has become an important and controversial issue in nursing.
Advocates have long contended that the associate degree nurse is vital to the American health care system. This study, funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, confirms this view. In recent years the Foundation has invested more than $6.1 million in the development of the ADN, awarded by junior and community colleges. Many participants in the ADN projects for the Kellogg Foundation have noted that, despite the importance of the ADN and the controversy about its place in nursing education, the literature is scattered and hard to identity. The Origins and Rise of Associate Degree Nursing Education and the companion bibliography will provide much-needed information to educators, hospital and nursing administrators, nursing leaders, and public policy makers—all of whom must cope with the growing nursing shortage and increasingly difficult issues in health policy and administration.
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Others' Milk
The Potential of Exceptional Breastfeeding
Wilson, Kristin J.
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Breastfeeding rarely conforms to the idealized Madonna-and-baby image seen in old artwork, now re-cast in celebrity breastfeeding photo spreads and pro-breastfeeding ad campaigns. The personal accounts in Others’ Milk illustrate just how messy and challenging and unpredictable it can be—an uncomfortable reality in the contemporary context of high-stakes motherhood in which “successful” breastfeeding proves one’s maternal mettle. 

Exceptional breastfeeders find creative ways to feed and care for their children—such as by inducing lactation, sharing milk, or exclusively pumping. They want to adhere to the societal ideal of giving them “the best” but sometimes have to face off with dogmatic authorities in order to do so. Kristin J. Wilson argues that while breastfeeding is never going to be the feasible choice for everyone, it should be accessible to anyone.  
[more]

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Parish Nursing - 2011 Edition
Stories of Service and Care
Verna Benner Carson
Templeton Press, 2011

The engaging stories in Parish Nursing provide accessible and enjoyable accounts of real parish nurses, both paid and volunteer, who attend to the needs of their congregations in a variety of ways—from home, hospice, and hospital visits to community outreach. This revised edition gathers their stories of hearing and heeding God’s call, of their faith that they are doing the “right thing,” of their joys, sorrows, and challenges, and of their quiet dedication as they offer their time and talents to meet the needs of others.


 

By offering inspiration and encouragement, along with a healthy dose of updated practical advice, this collection will make parish nursing theory come to life. These stories will honor practicing parish nurses, will guide the way for anyone contemplating parish nursing as a career, and will challenge church members and leaders to examine the role that their congregations play in health ministry—especially in meeting the long-term care needs of an aging population.


 
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Performance Standards for Restaurants
A New Approach to Addressing the Obesity Epidemic
Deborah Cohen
RAND Corporation, 2013
This report presents the results of a conference of 38 national experts in nutrition and public health who met to develop performance standards that could guide restaurants toward facilitating healthier choices among consumers and that local communities or states could use as a model for developing and implementing either voluntary or mandatory certification programs.
[more]

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The Physician's Hand
Work Culture and Conflict in American Nursing
Barbara Melosh
Temple University Press, 1982

This book recasts nursing history and places it in the context of women’s history, labor history, medical history, and sociology. Removed from the limited framework of professionalization, nursing history can provide a fresh perspective on broader issues in social history. First, it offers an illuminating example of the ways in which gender informs work and, conversely. How work reproduces and transforms relationships of power and inequality.

Second, the experience of nurses adds a new dimension to our understanding of work. More than a study of professionalization, nursing history is the story of women workers’ experience in a rationalizing service industry. Like other workers, nurses faced a fundamental reorganization of work that changed the content and experience of nursing. But unlike many others, they did not suffer a dilution of skill. The book also explores the shifting configurations of social relations on the job and their implications for nurses’ work.

Third, nurses’ history provides a useful standpoint for analyzing the possibilities and limitations of women’s work.

Finally, nursing history alerts us to the complexities of working women’s consciousness, countering the common notion of women’s passivity in the workplace.

The Physician’s Hand traces nursing history from the twenties to the seventies. It begins just after World War I when the "trained nurse" had gained a secure place in medical care but not yet found a niche in the hospital. Most worked in private duty. Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical framework of professionalization. Chapter 2 examines the history and culture of hospital schools, and the following chapters focus on the changing structure and experience of nursing in its three major settings: private duty nursing, public health care, and hospital work. The conclusion weighs the competing traditions of professionalization and occupational culture in nurses’ history and their meaning for the current crisis in nursing.

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Practical Decision Making in Health Care Ethics
Cases, Concepts, and the Virtue of Prudence, Fourth Edition
Raymond J. Devettere
Georgetown University Press, 2016

For more than twenty years Practical Decision Making in Health Care Ethics has offered scholars and students a highly accessible and teachable alternative to the dominant principle-based theories in the field. Raymond J. Devettere's approach is not based on an ethics of abstract obligations and duties but, following Aristotle, on how to live a fulfilled and happy life—in short, an ethics of personal well-being grounded in prudence, the virtue of ethical decision making.

New sections added in this revised fourth edition include sequencing whole genomes, even those of newborns; the new developments in genetic testing now provided by online commercial companies such as 23andMe; the genetic testing of fetuses by capturing their DNA circulating in the pregnant woman's blood; the Stanford Prison experiment and its relevance to the abuses at the Abu Graib prison; recent breakthroughs in the diagnosis of consciousness disorders such as PVS; the ongoing controversy generated by the NIH study of premature babies at many NICUs throughout the county, a study known as SUPPORT that the OHRP (Office of Human Research Protections, an office within the department of HHS) deemed unethical.

Devettere updates most chapters. New cases include Marlise Munoz (dead pregnant woman's body kept on life support by a Texas hospital), Jahi McMath (teenager pronounced dead in California but treated as alive in New Jersey), Margot Bentley (nursing home feeding a woman dying of end stage Alzheimer’s despite her advance directive that said no nourishment or liquids if she was dying with dementia), Brittany Maynard (dying 29-year-old California woman who moved to Oregon to commit suicide with a physician's help), and Samantha Burton (woman with two children who suffered rupture of membranes at 25 weeks and whose physician obtained a court order to keep her at the hospital to make sure she stayed on bed rest). Thoughtfully updated and renewed for a new generation of readers, this classic textbook will be required reading for students and scholars of philosophy and medical ethics.

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Prelude to Hospice
Florence Wald, Dying People, and their Families
Abel, Emily K.
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Hospices have played a critical role in transforming ideas about death and dying. Viewing death as a natural event, hospices seek to enable people approaching mortality to live as fully and painlessly as possible. Award-winning medical historian Emily K. Abel provides insight into several important issues surrounding the growth of hospice care. Using a unique set of records, Prelude to Hospice expands our understanding of the history of U.S. hospices. Compiled largely by Florence Wald, the founder of the first U.S. hospice, the records provide a detailed account of her experiences studying and caring for dying people and their families in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although Wald never published a report of her findings, she often presented her material informally. Like many others seeking to found new institutions, she believed she could garner support only by demonstrating that her facility would be superior in every respect to what currently existed. As a result, she generated inflated expectations about what a hospice could accomplish. Wald’s records enable us to glimpse the complexities of the work of tending to dying people. 
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The Renewal of Generosity
Illness, Medicine, and How to Live
Arthur W. Frank
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Contemporary health care often lacks generosity of spirit, even when treatment is most efficient. Too many patients are left unhappy with how they are treated, and too many medical professionals feel estranged from the calling that drew them to medicine. Arthur W. Frank tells the stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who are restoring generosity to medicine—generosity toward others and to themselves.

The Renewal of Generosity evokes medicine as the face-to-face encounter that comes before and after diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, and surgeries. Frank calls upon the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to reflect on stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who transform demoralized medicine into caring relationships. He presents their stories as a source of consolation for both ill and professional alike and as an impetus to changing medical systems. Frank shows how generosity is being renewed through dialogue that is more than the exchange of information. Dialogue is an ethic and an ideal for people on both sides of the medical encounter who want to offer more to those they meet and who want their own lives enriched in the process.

The Renewal of Generosity views illness and medical work with grace and compassion, making an invaluable contribution to expanding our vision of suffering and healing.
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Rest Uneasy
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in Twentieth-­Century America
Cowgill, Brittany
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Tracing the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) diagnosis from its mid-century origins through the late 1900s, Rest Uneasy investigates the processes by which SIDS became both a discrete medical enigma and a source of social anxiety construed differently over time and according to varying perspectives. American medicine reinterpreted and reconceived of the problem of sudden infant death multiple times over the course of the twentieth century. Its various approaches linked sudden infant deaths to all kinds of different causes—biological, anatomical, environmental, and social. In the context of a nation increasingly skeptical, yet increasingly expectant, of medicine, Americans struggled to cope with the paradoxes of sudden infant death; they worked to admit their powerlessness to prevent SIDS even while they tried to overcome it. Brittany Cowgill chronicles and assesses Americans’ fraught but consequential efforts to explain and conquer SIDS, illuminating how and why SIDS has continued to cast a shadow over doctors and parents.
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The Rise of Mental Health Nursing
A History of Psychiatric Care in Dutch Asylums, 1890-1920
Geertje Boschma
Amsterdam University Press, 2003
Geertje Boschma's complex study examines issues from the rise of scientific psychiatry and the emergence of mental health nursing to the social relationships of class, gender, and religion that structured asylum care in the Netherlands around 1900. Drawing on the archival collections of four Dutch asylums, Boschma highlights the gendered nature of mental health nursing politics, and captures the contradictory realities of hospital-oriented asylum care, both illustrating the social complexity of the care of the mentally ill and offering an important addition to the history of European psychiatry.
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Safe in a Midwife's Hands
Birthing Traditions from Africa to the American South
Linda Janet Holmes
The Ohio State University Press, 2023
Ms. Magazine “Most Anticipated Feminist Book of 2023”

After a less-than-positive experience giving birth as a Black woman in the 1970s, Linda Janet Holmes launched a lifetime of work as an activist dedicated to learning about and honoring alternative birth traditions and the Black women behind them. Safe in a Midwife’s Hands brings together what Holmes has gleaned from the countless midwives who have shared with her their experiences, at a time when their knowledge and holistic approaches are essential counterbalances to a medical system that routinely fails Black mothers and babies. Building on work she began in the 1980s, when she interviewed traditional Black midwives in Alabama and Virginia, Holmes traveled to Ghana, Ethiopia, and Kenya to visit midwives there. In detailing their work, from massage to the uses of medicinal plants to naming ceremonies, she links their voices to those of midwives and doulas in the US. She thus illuminates parallels between birthing traditions that have survived hundreds of years of colonialism, enslavement, Jim Crow, and ongoing medical racism to persist as vital cultural practices that promote healthy outcomes for mothers and babies during pregnancy, birth, and beyond.
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Shaping Nursing Science and Improving Health
The Michigan Legacy
Shaké Ketefian, editor
Michigan Publishing Services, 2016
Shaping Nursing Science and Improving Health: The Michigan Legacy chronicles the growth and development of nursing research and scholarship, and the outstanding contributions made to the discipline and the profession of nursing in the United States and beyond by the School of Nursing, University of Michigan.

The work covers selectively the development of nursing science over a period of some thirty years which was undertaken by nursing faculty and the School’s PhD Alumni. The account of the strategic development of a program of research across bio-behavioral phenomena, health promotion/risk reduction, women’s health and nursing and health care systems is instructive. Substantive contributions have been made across the selected areas; of note also is the impact of translational science on health outcomes of individuals and communities. The accounts of the purposeful development of health informatics in nursing and leadership as scholarship are also highly developed. The book is a valuable contribution to the literature on how nursing research at Michigan is helping transform the lives of patients, families and communities.
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Spiritual Caregiving
Healthcare As A Ministry
Verna Benner Carson
Templeton Press, 2004

With today's cumbersome insurance procedures, government regulations, endless paperwork, and concerns about malpractice rates, many health care professionals are asking: "Why am I doing this? Am I making a difference to my patients? Is there a better way—and if so, what is it?" In this book, Carson and Koenig examine the state of the health care system with the goal of providing healthcare professionals and caregivers the inspiration and practical tools to reclaim their sense of purpose.

The book begins with an evaluation of the current system from the perspective of the spiritual vision that initially motivated and nourished many caregivers. The authors then pose a vision of a health care system that supports and nurtures the spirituality of patients and their families, of which some elements already exist.

An overview is provided on the preparation necessary for health care professionals to offer spiritual care when there are major implications—for people with chronic illnesses, psychiatric issues, devastating injuries, and those preparing for surgery, facing death, and those living with chronic pain. Also explored are ways that health professionals and caregivers can maintain their own spiritual health even as they work to bring about healing, comfort, and solace to others.

Woven throughout the book are the personal narratives of physicians, nurses, chaplains, health care educators, community resource workers, administrators, therapists, and psychologists—all from a wide range of religious traditions. Their examples inspire and assist professionals in renewing the spiritual focus of health care.

 

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Spiritual Dimensions of Nursing Practice
Verna Benner Carson
Templeton Press, 2008

Ever since the first edition of Verna Benner Carson's Spiritual Dimensions of Nursing Practice went out of print, second-hand copies have been highly sought after by practitioners in the field and nursing school faculty who appreciated the comprehensive scope of the seminal work on spirituality and health. In this highly anticipated revised edition, Carson and her co-editor, Harold G. Koenig, have thoroughly revised and updated this classic in the field.

The revised edition builds on the foundations laid in the first, providing perspectives on new research in the spiritual dimensions of nursing care, applying nursing theory to spiritual care, and addressing the spiritual needs of both nurses and patients. It also examines ethical issues in nursing and the impact of legal decisions on health care issues. Contributors address issues of spiritual development across the entire lifespan—from the spiritual needs and influences of the very young to the elderly, including those facing chronic illnesses or death. The volume takes a similarly broad approach in addressing spiritual issues from a variety of faith backgrounds—including both theistic and pantheistic religious practices, so that nurses can be prepared to meet the needs of patients from various religious traditions.
 
Second to chaplains, nurses are the major providers of spiritual care, and no other book will serve their needs like Spiritual Dimensions of Nursing Practice.
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Spirituality and Health Research
Methods, Measurements, Statistics, and Resources
Harold G Koenig
Templeton Press, 2011

In Spirituality and Health Research: Methods, Measurement, Statistics, and Resources, Dr. Harold G. Koenig leads a comprehensive overview of this complex subject. Dr. Koenig is one of the world’s leading authorities on the relationship between spirituality and health, and a leading researcher on the topic. As such, he is distinctively qualified to author such a book.

This unique source of information on how to conduct research on religion, spirituality, and health includes practical information that goes well beyond what is typically taught in most undergraduate, graduate, or even post-doctoral level courses. This volume reviews what research has been done, discusses the strengths and limitations of that research, provides a research agenda for the future that describes the most important studies that need to be done to advance the field, and describes how to actually conduct that research (design, statistical analysis, and publication of results). It also covers practical matters such as how to write fundable grants to support the research, where to find sources of funding support for research in this area, and what can be done even if the researcher has little or no funding support.
 
The information gathered together here, which has been reviewed for accuracy and comprehensiveness by research design and statistical experts, has been acquired during a span of over twenty-five years that Dr. Koenig spent conducting research, reviewing others’ research, reviewing research grants, and interacting with mainstream biomedical researchers both within and outside the field of spirituality and health. The material is presented in an easy to read and readily accessible form that will benefit researchers at almost any level of training and experience.
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Strong Hearts and Healing Hands
Southern California Indians and Field Nurses, 1920–1950
Clifford E. Trafzer
University of Arizona Press, 2021
In 1924, the United States began a bold program in public health. The Indian Service of the United States hired its first nurses to work among Indians living on reservations. This corps of white women were dedicated to improving Indian health. In 1928, the first field nurses arrived in the Mission Indian Agency of Southern California. These nurses visited homes and schools, providing public health and sanitation information regarding disease causation and prevention.

Over time, field nurses and Native people formed a positive working relationship that resulted in the decline of mortality from infectious diseases. Many Native Americans accepted and used Western medicine to fight pathogens, while also continuing Indigenous medicine ways. Nurses helped control tuberculosis, measles, influenza, pneumonia, and a host of gastrointestinal sicknesses. In partnership with the community, nurses quarantined people with contagious diseases, tested for infections, and tracked patients and contacts. Indians turned to nurses and learned about disease prevention. With strong hearts, Indians eagerly participated in the tuberculosis campaign of 1939–40 to x-ray tribal members living on twenty-nine reservations. Through their cooperative efforts, Indians and health-care providers decreased deaths, cases, and misery among the tribes of Southern California.
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Take Care
Communicating in English with Health Care Workers
Nina Ito and Christopher Mefford
University of Michigan Press, 2023

A high level of communicative skills are essential and expected for health care workers. Take Care is designed to give readers the strategies and tools to build, maintain, and repair communication within interactions that take place in health care settings. It is designed for students who are enrolled in health care training as well as nurses or health care workers who are already on the job but may want to improve their English. This text is designed to provide readers with a firm grasp of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies for more successful interactions. It will also help readers develop strategic competence by asking them to practice formulaic phrases needed to get things done. Carefully selected situations will also help readers to understand some of the social situations health care workers need to prepare for, such as apologizing, expressing condolences, or giving advice.

Take Care breaks each unit into the following sections to teach readers new skills:

  • Listening for Language
  • Dialogue
  • Vocabulary
  • Communication Strategy
  • Pronunciation
  • Dialogue Review
  • Role Plays
  • End-of-Unit Discussion
  • Culture Point

This revised edition is updated to include information about pandemics, vaccines, and other medical developments. Audio files for the listening activities are available online. 

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Take Care
Communicating in English with U.S. Health Care Workers
Nina Ito and Christopher Mefford
University of Michigan Press, 2011

Take Care was written to help nursing students and other health care workers communicate better in health care settings, with a focus on improving speaking and listening skills, vocabulary, and pronunciation. The aim was to provide users with the tools and specific communication strategies to build, maintain, or repair interactions that take place on the job. This book is also designed to develop the pragmatic competence necessary to get things done on the job and to understand some of the social situations required by health care workers, like expressing condolences or giving advice.

The individuals most likely to benefit from the material in the book are:

  • Nursing students enrolled in community college (e.g., pre-nursing courses or RN students who have a special class)

·         ESL students enrolled in specific CNA or medical assistant classes

·         ESL students enrolled in U.S. universities who are here to learn more about nursing or health care as profession (they may or may not already have a degree in their own countries)

·         Nurses or health care workers who already work in a health care setting but who are not proficient in English and so may be taking an English course sponsored by the hospital or local health system

It is therefore generally assumed that students have some knowledge of common medical and health care terms, so the book does not attempt to teach medical terminology, except in the context of communicating effectively in a health care setting. The various Vocabulary sections in each unit can therefore be used as review or as a new lesson—whatever works best for your students.

Instructors using this book do not need knowledge of the field of nursing or health care because the majority of material covered focuses on the language, not the industry.

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front cover of Taking Care of Time
Taking Care of Time
Cortney Davis
Michigan State University Press, 2018
For poet and nurse practitioner Cortney Davis, the truth revealed through poetry is similar to what she has experienced in the heightened and urgent dramas that occur in health care—those suspended moments in which a dying heart might be revived or unbearable suffering relieved. We are vulnerable, her poems say, and we are dependent on one another—on the ways in which we care or fail to care for one another, in how we love or fail to love. In poems that are sensual, emotionally searing, and yet unfailingly tender, Davis shines a caregiver’s light on the most intimate details of the human body and the spirit within—how the flesh might betray, how it endures, and how ultimately it triumphs. 
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front cover of Teaching the Practitioners of Care
Teaching the Practitioners of Care
New Pedagogies for the Health Professions
Edited by Nancy L. Diekelmann
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003
Contributors
Nancy L. Diekelmann
Karin Dahlberg
Margaretha Ekebergh
Pamela M. Ironside
Kathryn Hopkins Kavanagh
Melinda M. Swenson
Sharon L. Sims
Rosemary A. McEldowney
Jan D. Sinnott
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logo for University of Minnesota Press
A Textbook of Nursing Technique
Marion Vannier
University of Minnesota Press, 1935
A Textbook of Nursing Technique was first published in 1929 under the title, Nursing Procedures. This second, revised edition was published in 1935. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.An enlarged and completely revised second edition of this manual. The new book’s purpose is the same as that of the earlier one - to assure accuracy in detail by giving a full outline of procedures and to obviate note-taking by student nurses during demonstrations by the instructor.While based on techniques used in the four associated hospitals of the University of Minnesota School of Nursing, this edition has been made much more general in scope than its predecessor, and will be found of value in all nursing schools.
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front cover of Unitary Caring Science
Unitary Caring Science
Philosophy and Praxis of Nursing
Jean Watson
University Press of Colorado, 2018
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Values at the End of Life
The Logic of Palliative Care
Roi Livne
Harvard University Press, 2019

This insightful study examines the deeply personal and heart-wrenching tensions among financial considerations, emotional attachments, and moral arguments that motivate end-of-life decisions.

America’s health care system was built on the principle that life should be prolonged whenever possible, regardless of the costs. This commitment has often meant that patients spend their last days suffering from heroic interventions that extend their life by only weeks or months. Increasingly, this approach to end-of-life care is coming under scrutiny, from a moral as well as a financial perspective. Sociologist Roi Livne documents the rise and effectiveness of hospice and palliative care, and growing acceptance of the idea that a life consumed by suffering may not be worth living.

Values at the End of Life combines an in-depth historical analysis with an extensive study conducted in three hospitals, where Livne observed terminally ill patients, their families, and caregivers negotiating treatment. Livne describes the ambivalent, conflicted moments when people articulate and act on their moral intuitions about dying. Interviews with medical staff allowed him to isolate the strategies clinicians use to help families understand their options. As Livne discovered, clinicians are advancing the idea that invasive, expensive hospital procedures often compound a patient’s suffering. Affluent, educated families were more readily persuaded by this moral calculus than those of less means.

Once defiant of death—or even in denial—many American families and professionals in the health care system are beginning to embrace the notion that less treatment in the end may be better treatment.

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What Do I Say?
Talking with Patients about Spirituality
Elizabeth Johnston-Taylor
Templeton Press, 2007
Health care professionals, clergy, chaplains, social workers, and others who counsel people in medical crisis often find themselves faced with deeply painful questions: Why is this happening to me? Am I dying? Why should I live? I'm just a burden to others.
Here is a workbook that suggests healing verbal responses to such expressions of spiritual pain. The author, an internationally recognized expert in spiritual caregiving, points out that wanting to help is one motivation for learning these skills, but there are also evidence-based reasons: helping patients express their innermost feelings promotes spiritual healing; spiritual health is related to physical and emotional health; spiritual coping helps patients accept and deal with their illness; and patients tend to want their health care professionals to know about their spirituality.
Lessons, tips, and exercises teach how to listen effectively, with guidelines for detecting and understanding the spiritual needs embedded in patients' conversations. Suggestions are provided for verbal responses to patients who express spiritual distress, including tips for building rapport, using self-disclosure, and praying with patients. A FAQ section deals with frequently asked questions and miscellaneous information, such as:
•What do I do when a patient talks on and on and I have to leave?
•How do I answer a "why" question?
•What do I say to a patient who believes a miracle will happen to cure them?
•What if I'm not religious? How can I talk about it?
By practicing and using these healing techniques, Taylor explains, healthcare professionals will be able to provide patients responses to their questions that allow them to become intellectually, emotionally, and physically aware of their spirituality so they can experience life more fully.
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